Feynman knew physics but he didn't know ornithology. When you name a bird, you've actually identified a whole lot of important things about it.

I think Feynman's point was that a name is meaningful if you already know the other information. I can memorize a list of names of North American birds, but at the end I'll have learned next to nothing about them. I can also spend my days observing birds and learn a lot without knowing any of their names.

Assigning consistent names to the right groups of things is colossally important to biology and physics.

I don't think anyone will disagree with this. The hard part, though, is properly setting up the groups in the first place. Good classification systems took years (or centuries) of work and refinement to become the systems we take for granted today.

Not being able to name birds for an ornithologist would be like a physicist not being able to say whether an electron and a positron are the same thing or not.

Feynman has been quoted elsewhere criticizing students for parroting physics terminology without having the least idea of what they're actually talking about. There's the anecdote about students who knew all about the laws of refraction but failed to identify water as a medium with a refractive index.